French Ubisoft employees urged to strike over new return to office policy: 'The consequence of its decision will be the loss of our colleagues' jobs' - "The SJTV (Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo), a French videogame workers union, has called all Ubisoft employees in France to join in a three-day strike in October, to protest changes in the publisher's global remote work policy. Earlier this week, Ubisoft informed its employees that all workers—in every office, worldwide—would now be expected to return to office work at least three days a week... "After more than five years of working efficiently in the current remote-work context, many of our colleagues have built or rebuilt their lives (family life, housing, parenthood, etc.) and simply cannot return to the previous working conditions. Our employer knows this perfectly well. The consequence of its decision will be the loss of our colleagues' jobs, the disorganization of many game projects, and the drastic increase in psychosocial risks for those who remain.""
Amazon will be bringing employees back to the office 5 days a week starting in January
Almost half of workers would quit if asked to work in the office more - "46 per cent would threaten to switch jobs if asked to increase their in-office workdays, while one in five of their employers want them in the office more... While some employers want to see their employees in the office more, 79 per cent said they would not issue a full return-to-office yet, even if it had no impact on retention, the survey said. Fox said employers should offer benefits that better reflect employee needs and preferences in order to retain them and encourage more in-office attendance. Ways to get them back into the office include offering flexible work hours, enhancing office amenities, assisting employee spend like subsidizing travel or providing a meal, among others, he said. “Working in the office has clear advantages — you can interact more with your colleagues, contribute to team projects and be more visible. You can also learn new skills, get guidance from senior staff and feel more engaged with the workplace culture”"
The golden age of overemployment is over. Job jugglers are preparing for life with only one income. - "it's harder to land a remote job than it once was. During the height of the pandemic, when roughly half of working hours in the US were done remotely — and fully remote roles were plentiful — the rise of overemployment followed. However, the return-to-office mandates of recent years have made these jobs less prevalent. Additionally, the competition for remote roles has heated up. The share of fully remote job postings on LinkedIn has declined from 20% in April 2022 to about 8% as of May, according to LinkedIn data provided to BI. Despite the decline, LinkedIn said 46% of the applications in December on its platform were for fully remote roles. At the same time, some companies in the IT and tech industries have laid off workers and slowed hiring. These industries have offered many overemployed workers the combination of remote working arrangements and job flexibility that make juggling multiple jobs possible. What's more, some companies have rolled out employee-monitoring software that has made it more difficult for job jugglers to avoid detection. Even if remote jobs were plentiful, some overemployed workers told BI that their job juggling always had an expiration date: at some point, they would burn out. To be sure, remote work hasn't gone away. In June, about 24% of full-time US workers age 16 and older worked from home at least some of the time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics's current population survey. Eleven percent were remote for all their working hours. In June 2023, 20% of full-time workers did some remote work — 10% were fully remote."
If you swipe your card and then leave the office, you might be a coffee badger - "Your employer said you had to show up at the office. But they never said you had to stay there. That’s the ethos behind coffee badging, the latest buzzword(s) used to describe workers who don’t want to work in the traditional way... more than half of hybrid employees (58 per cent) had engaged in the practice, with another 8 per cent saying they haven’t but would like to try it. The survey also found that 66 per cent of respondents said they were in the office full-time, but only 22 per cent wanted to be. Clearly something had to give, and coffee badging was it... if people are seeing the need to avoid returning to work, it may signal either that it’s not really necessary, or that the necessity hasn’t been communicated well. And here’s an unusual strategy — free coffee. Another poll last year found that providing free drinks was the best way to convince people to return to the office, with coffee singled out by two thirds of those polled."
A millennial who made over $300,000 secretly working 2 remote jobs says he'll do whatever he can to ensure he never has to commute to work again - "over the past year, he said the job market for the types of roles he's interested in has "dried up." That's because some companies in his industry have scaled back hiring, while others are mainly recruiting for in-person or hybrid roles. It's left him clinging to his two remaining remote jobs, which have allowed him to not only bring in extra income — but avoid the dreaded work commute... the share of US fully remote job postings on LinkedIn fell from over 20% in April 2022 to about 10% in December 2023. Hiring slowdowns in industries like tech — where remote work and overemployment are more common — and shifts to hybrid working arrangements have both played a role in this decline. But despite this dropoff, job seekers' demand for remote roles remains strong — LinkedIn said fully remote jobs accounted for nearly half of all applications in December."
Richard Hanania on X - "Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in the office. In August, the Biden administration asked them to return to work. A union representative responds that government workers are heroes and they don't have to show up if they don't want to."
Opinion | Federal workers are slow to return to work - The Washington Post - "Only 6 percent of federal workers are working full-time in their offices; 30 percent are fully remote, according to a Federal News Network survey this spring. Some agencies are using less than 10 percent of their space."
Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? | The New Yorker - "people working in open offices take sixty-two per cent more sick leave, according to a 2011 Danish study... Workers have responded to this steady erosion of personal space by building cubicles of sound with headphones. Bound in a sonic nutshell, you can feel like a king of infinite office space, as long as you don’t look up from your screen. Since most office work takes place on virtual desktops anyway, it was easy, pre-pandemic, to perform what was essentially remote work while occupying your employer’s expensive real estate. In “The Truth About Open Offices,” an article published in the Harvard Business Review in December, 2019, Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber, the president of Humanyze, a workplace-analytics firm, used smartphones and sensors to track face-to-face and digital interactions at two Fortune 500 companies before and after the companies moved from cubicles to open offices. The authors wrote, “We found that face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly 70% after the firms transitioned to open offices, while electronic interactions increased to compensate.” The virtual workplace, instead of complementing the physical one, had become a refuge from it. The technology industry gave birth to the modern office, and then created the tools to do without it. This paradox helps explain tech’s tortured history with remote work. By 2009, forty per cent of I.B.M.’s workforce was remote. The I.B.M. Smarter Workforce Institute promoted “telework” to clients as the future, claiming that remote workers “were highly engaged, more likely to consider their workplaces as innovative, happier about their job prospects and less stressed than their more traditional, office-bound colleagues.” But in 2017, with profits falling, the company delivered an ultimatum: everyone must return to the office or leave the company. Likewise, Marissa Mayer, shortly after becoming the C.E.O. of Yahoo, in 2012, issued an edict to its twelve thousand employees banning W.F.H. Both companies cited diminished collaboration as a reason."
The Real Reason You're Having a Hard Time Getting Things Done at the Office - "Frustrated bosses who survey their half-empty officescapes say it makes no sense that somebody who worked full time in an office before 2020 can’t show up like they used to. But neurologists and behavioral scientists say the collective amnesia for effectively working alongside each other makes perfect sense to them."
Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” - " Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid. Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week. Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company. Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell's plan to restore its in-office culture... One person said they'd spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices. Many interviewed admitted they were looking for work at other companies that aren't trying to corral employees back into the office. Dell is not the only company struggling with this. For example, we've reported several times on Apple's internal struggles and employee revolts over remote work... Research on this topic has offered mixed insights, but there does seem to be some consensus that remote work is accompanied by very modest drops in productivity—for example, a working study at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research suggested around a 10 percent drop in productivity, even as it noted that the cost-saving benefits of remote work could make up for some of that."
You can try to bully workers back into the office — but that won’t solve the real problem - "Toronto mayor Olivia Chow wants workers back in their offices downtown. As the Toronto Star reported, the move is a bid to bring the financial district “back to life.” Chow has been meeting with the chief executives of major companies, including Canada’s top banks, to figure out how to make it happen and how to, as she told the Star, “make sure our financial district is vibrant.” As CEOs scheme to force people back to the office, workers are, of course, being talked about as mere spending fodder. Chow should tell them to back off and leave workers alone... Commuting is hell, and no one likes it. It also takes a toll on city infrastructure and the environment, which is a double-whammy. Dragging yourself out of bed in the dark to dress and prepare to head into the office is also miserable. And workers can be forgiven for preferring not to put themselves through the rigamarole just so they can keep the local sandwich shop in business... The work of getting people downtown is the work of building an affordable, accessible, inviting city. There’s no shortcut to doing that"
Ironically, if you fight the homeless-industrial complex and pro-crime lobby to make downtown a more pleasant place, the left wing writers at TVO won't be happy either
The article doesn't mention how commercial property tax revenues pay a lot of bills. But not to worry, you can always tax "the rich" more so they pay their "fair share"
I caught my employee secretly working a second remote job. Here's why I decided to fire them — and why I think overemployment is unethical. - "unrelated to this particular employee, my company rolled out the time-tracking software called DeskTime. My long-term goal is to introduce a four-day workweek at my company, and I decided the first step in this process would be understanding how my employees spend their time and what could be optimized to boost productivity. So our entire team of full-time employees and freelance contractors started using DeskTime. They each had to install the app on their computers, so everyone was well aware that this was being implemented. After a few weeks, I looked through the tracking data of the struggling employee and noticed there was another company's name — a US business — that regularly appeared in the data. It became clear to me that this employee had worked on some other company's tasks."
According to new research, remote workers are less likely to get promoted - "New data from employment-data provider Live Data Technologies, which analysed “two million white-collar workers”, shows that over the past year, remote workers were promoted 31% less frequently than those who worked in an office, either full-time or on a hybrid basis... In the U.S., salaries too, are reflecting a move back to the office, and we can expect the trend to travel. The percentage of high-paying roles of $100,000 or more, which are available to work on a hybrid schedule, fell 40% during the first quarter of 2024, according to a recent report from Ladders. Remote work now makes up just 9% of six-figure career opportunities, with in-person roles now accounting for 89% of high-paying jobs."
Survey: Americans are tired of remote work during pandemic - "Sixty-three percent of respondents said they felt like the cons outweigh the pros — so much so that 3 in 10 people said they have considered quitting their job since the coronavirus pandemic banned them from their workplaces, according to the survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Front, a company that offers collaborative email for customer communication. The same amount of people said they even considered changing careers altogether. The top reasons why people have considered quitting are unreasonable workloads in short periods of time (17%), lack of connection to their team (14%), and their company’s poor handling of their transition from in-person to remote locations (14%)."
From 2020. Some people are very upset by polls such as these, since they are unable to imagine others have a different view
Fully Remote Work Will Make You Less Happy - The Atlantic - "aggravation from commuting is no match for the misery of loneliness, which can lead to depression, substance abuse, sedentary behavior, and relationship damage, among other ills. And it is simply undeniable that remote work usually leads to loneliness. In research conducted more than a decade before the pandemic about remote work among journalists, the organizational psychologist Lynn Holdsworth found that full-time telework increased loneliness over office work by 67 percentage points. Based on data from 2019, the 2020 State of Remote Work report issued by the social-media management firm Buffer showed that loneliness is the biggest struggle remote workers say they face, tied with problems of collaboration and communication. Work is where many people have the bulk of their social interactions. In a recent survey, 70 percent of employees said friendship at their job is the most important element of a happy work life. Research shows that employees say a co-located office environment is where they establish not just work collaborations but also their social ties... In the first study to examine the effects of Zoom since the pandemic’s onset, psychologists at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Cambridge surveyed 119 young adults on their mental health and found that “there was no association between the frequency of virtual social interactions and well-being.” That leaves us with the conclusion that while remote technologies might be a necessary substitute for in-person work during the pandemic, they are inadequate to meet our human need for contact... “Zoom forever” could escalate our epidemic of loneliness... Research suggests that the benefits of remote work start to plateau after only about 15 hours a week... Research demonstrates that loneliness can drive employee burnout and turnover, which makes perfect sense given that friendship at work is a big part of a job’s true compensation. Making workers lonely is like gradually lowering their salaries"
Meme - Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke: "At my hedge fund, I pay an analyst to walk around parks in Austin, SF, and NY and ask these people who are tanning at 2pm on a Tuesday where they work. We then short the stock. We're up 728% this year."
Zac Solomon @ZacSolomon: "on a Tuesday in Austin. Work from home culture here is STRONG"
I dreamed of travelling while working remotely — then it became my nightmare - "‘I just knew I needed a base that I could call my home, with all of my belongings in one location, to slow down and reconnect with myself and friends and family,’ she told Metro.co.uk. ‘I came to the conclusion that although I love to travel, I don’t have to do it year-round.’ Alongside being unable to put down roots, there are some practical elements to being a digital nomad Lou found hard. ‘Wi-Fi can be so unreliable,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how many hours a week I would be stressed out at the Wi-Fi not being strong enough, or arriving at a café to work and the Wi-Fi let me down last minute. ‘It was infuriating and not something you have to worry about when you are just holidaying.’ Loneliness also got to her, with Lou explaining: ‘I’m a very social person and I love to spend time with my friends and family. ‘But being so far away from home meant you had to find new people to hang out with, which often involved drinking more alcohol than I would at home, and often you aren’t both in the same spot for a long time, which means friends can be fleeting.’Additionally, despite it seeming like endless beach days and relaxation, there’s still plenty of work in ‘work from holiday’ living. Lou said: ‘There’s a lot of admin, whether it’s organising where to live, where and how to exercise, your next travel plans, where to eat, what to see, how to get there, time zone conflicts, thinking about your general safety in a foreign country, or language barriers. ‘You will often only see the exciting travel side of digital nomadism on social media, and not the hours of planning and organising to bring it all together, alongside working a regular job.’... ‘I definitely bit off more than I could chew by travelling around so much,’ she said. ‘Perhaps in comparison my life now is much quieter, but it is also much more wholesome than it was 12 months ago.’ Lou now spends her time meal prepping, walking the dog she adopted while travelling, renovating her home and training for a half marathon she’s doing in May; a welcome change from the chaos of being on the road... ‘It’s easy to treat digital nomadism like a long holiday by eating and drinking out all the time, this will only hurt your bank balance, and if you’re anything like me, your waistline. I wish I had found a healthier routine earlier in the adventure!’"
Canada's out-of-touch public sector unions are taking their entitlement too far - "we heard calls from public sector unions for the NDP to abandon the parliamentary agreement and precipitate a federal election due to the government’s new policy that federal public servants must be in the office at least three days per week. It seems like a rather odd issue over which to plunge the country into a summer election. Especially since most Canadians have returned to the office. While remote and hybrid work reached as high as 40 percent of workers in April 2020 and then remained constant at about 24 percent between May 2021 and May 2023, the percentage was cut in half to just 12 percent as we entered 2024. The remaining share of Canadians still working from home is by far disproportionately comprised of public servants. A late 2023 poll, for instance, found that four in five federal employees were still working remotely in part or in full. From this perspective, the federal government’s three-day-per-week policy is far from punitive or radical. It remains more flexible and generous than a lot of other Canadian workplaces. Yet one wouldn’t know it from the reaction of the public sector unions. They called it a “slap in the face” and obliquely warned of a “summer of discontent.” One union representative even bizarrely described the physical workplace in terms typically reserved for third-world prisons... The unions’ extraordinary reaction strikes me as a misread of the Canadian public’s appetite to affirm their members’ asymmetric workplace arrangements. This isn’t a Norma Rae moment. It’s an expression of out-of-touch entitlement. We’ve previously warned about the growing divide between private and public sector workers. The sizeable gap in wages, benefits, job security, and broader perks already seemed unsustainable. Calling for an election and threatening work action to avoid having to show up to the office three days a week risks blowing the fault line wide open."
Left wingers are out of touch, so it's no wonder they support unions so much (except police ones)
Meme - Bryan Passifiume @BryanPassifiume: "The first week of mandated three-days-in-the-office for public servants seems to be going well…"
"Panic attacks due to RTo3. I have no idea why - I had no real issues prior to RTO3, but yesterday morning I had two large panic attacks (one while driving and one at the office). This morning I can't make myself get out of bed as the symptoms are the same. How do I deal with this? Ask for an accommodation for something I can't explain?"
Singapore orders all employers to consider workers’ flexi-time requests - "Workers in Singapore can now ask for four-day work weeks, more work-from-home days and staggered work timings starting from Dec 1, underscoring the global trend of governments and companies relaxing office arrangements in order to retain talent... Employees will also be entitled to ask for other arrangements such as flexible work locations come the end of this year... While the guideline isn’t enforceable by law, it does require all firms in Singapore to set up a process for employees to submit a formal flexible-working arrangement request. Employers can reject the request on the grounds it would result in a significant worsening of productivity, a significant increase in cost or because it’s not feasible given the nature of the work. Companies couldn’t however reject a request on the basis that it runs counter to a firm’s traditions or management simply doesn’t believe in such flexible work styles."
Daniel Lippman on X - "St. Louis’ “largest office building—the 44-story AT&T Tower, now empty—recently sold for around $3.5 million. … The price for the AT&T Tower, three blocks from the Railway Exchange, was a sliver of the $205 million it sold for in 2006.”"
The Real Estate Nightmare Unfolding in Downtown St. Louis - WSJ - "When the pandemic broke out in 2020 and millions of employees got used to working from home, pundits predicted the demise of big coastal cities. But office districts in New York, Miami and Boston have bounced back better than skeptics feared. The nascent boom in the artificial intelligence industry is even starting to attract some businesses back to San Francisco. It’s the cities far from the coasts that are suffering most. Six of the 10 U.S. office districts with the steepest drop in foot traffic between 2019 and mid-2023 are in the Midwest, according to the University of Toronto."
Why do companies want people back in the office even though study after study shows that working from home can lead to more efficiency and higher quality work? Here are 3 possible reasons - "For a company preparing to downsize, forcing staff to come back to the office can potentially provide an effective strategy to avoid or reduce layoffs. Companies that require in-person work report more problems with staff turnover, according to Criteria’s 2022 Hiring Benchmark Report. So rather than lay off staff, an employer can order a return to the office and let employees choose whether or not to leave... According to an analysis from Microsoft, working from home during the pandemic caused Microsoft employee groups to be less interconnected, less collaborative and more siloed... According to ExpressVPN, uncertainty and unease about what employees are doing is the primary reason employers are interested in surveillance. In a January 2021 study, 57% of bosses said they don’t trust their employees to work without in-person supervision."